Facebook Swaps Old Front Page For Real-time Dashboard

The social networking website Facebook has finally begun rolling out its much touted redesigned homepage, which primarily focuses on real-time updates from friends and contacts users have on the website.

In addition to accessing real-time updates, such as images, contents, comments, and videos, the new redesigned homepage also offer its users enhanced control over their contents, by using filters to decide upon what and who they view in their stream, Facebook claims.

Along with these, the new homepage also boasts of a new "Publisher" feature that enables users of the platform to create a message, attach media content, and share it with the other members of the website through their profile and via news feeds.

It further includes a new "Highlights" section that displays members the "most important activity" over a longer span of time as compared to real-time news feeds.

Quoting the use of the new homepage in enhancing the social networking experience, Peter Dang, Product Manager at Facebook, wrote in a blog post, "As more and more is shared, we want you to be able to find out everything that is going on in the world around you at any given moment, or shape the stream of information most relevant to you".

The homepage has been made available to a few members, with rest of the members of the website due to get the updated homepage in coming days.

The new user front page is slowly morphing into something similar to Google's iGoogle page or Yahoo's homepage. And why shouldn't it anyway. Facebook users on average spend more hours in the social networking's environment than on their emails (at least in the UK) and ultimately, we believe that Facebook will be looking to build a complete ecosystem.